Met Museum show at new Costume Institute puts fashion in same spotlight as Egyptian artefacts | Fashion

Speaking at the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute spring exhibition in New York, Anna Wintour described the first Monday in May as “her favorite and also the most terrifying day of the year.”

This Monday may be riskier than previous years, as Monday night’s Met Gala to open the exhibit sparked controversy due to sponsorships by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. This is also the inaugural exhibition of the Costume Institute’s new home: a 12,000-square-foot space called the Condé M Nast Galleries, which places the museum’s fashion exhibitions in a much higher-profile spot right next to the Great Hall.

Three times the size of the institute’s previous basement home, the gallery acknowledges the popularity of fashion exhibitions, which are among the Met’s most visited shows, and puts them in the same crowd-pleasing category as ancient Egyptian works.

In the exhibition titled Costume Art, 200 garments and accessories come together with 200 works of art from the Met’s collection. Chief curator Andrew Bolton said the idea was to invite us to “rethink long-standing hierarchies” and think about art in the context of the fashion pieces in the exhibition, rather than the other way around. It was inspired by the idea that one of the elements in the Met’s massive collection is the “dressed body.”

All this extra space gave Bolton the opportunity to explore his subject in depth, and he did so by grouping the show into 13 “thematic body types,” starting with the naked human body. The show opens with an area devoted to the Nude and Bare body, where Walter van Beirendonck’s spandex top and trompe l’oeil tights featuring male muscles and genitals are paired with Marcantonio Raimondi’s etching of Adam and Eve, and sculptures are placed alongside classically inspired draped dresses by contemporary designers Y/Project and Di Petsa.

The next salon is a swanky salon that focuses on body types that are underrated in fashion and western culture, Bolton said. These include three Comme des Garçons dresses paired with sinuous sculptures by Max Weber, Jean Arp and Henry Moore, in a selection titled The Abstracted Body, where the body shape is expanded and conceptualized into unexpected silhouettes.

A section on the Fat Body features ensembles by Australian designer Michaela Stark, whose corsets and bound garments deliberately emphasize bulges of fat and flesh, paired with a Cycladic marble female figure from 4500-4000 BC. Another work by Stark was paired with the Nana and the Serpent sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle.

Representations of the Disabled Body include a mannequin wearing a Burberry trench coat, echoing the style of campaigner Sinéad Burke, modified by photographer Tim Walker to suit her small stature, and a crown made from excess fabric cut from her arm.

Designed to highlight diversity in this section of the exhibition, all of the mannequins are placed on high podiums, or, as Bolton puts it, deliberately “pedestalized.” Seeing real body diversity in a fashion museum setting feels so much more refreshing and so much more interesting than it should be.

While there are many fine works of art on display (for example, a 1988 silk organza jacket embellished with Van Gogh’s Irises paired with an 1889 painting), the exhibition’s overall emphasis is on strangeness and surprise.

In a section on the Mortal Body, there are mainly anatomical body parts embroidered with dresses and skeleton-like statues and clothing; In a chapter on The Aging Body, a 1905 painting by George Luks depicts a Batsheva sweater emblazoned with the word Witch next to the Old Duchess; a Vetements hoodie that says “I’m Retired” next to a retiree’s Diane Arbus photo; A Sarah Lucas sculpture next to a wearable artwork by British designer Harry Pontefract made from what Bolton describes as “Nora Batty-like socks.”

The show’s press preview also foreshadows Monday’s Met Gala. Sánchez Bezos was there, wearing a shimmering bronze dress. Wintour, who made statements that would not appeal to the protesters who filled the city with posters calling for a boycott, underlined the necessity of funding the arts for a successful city and described Sánchez Bezos as “a force of joy, a force of generosity.” He said the Met Gala had created a ripple effect across New York, boosting trade for many local businesses, including “God knows how many hair salons”.